By Simon Ensor, Clermont Ferrand France
Why should writing to order having anything to do with feelings?
We shall see.
What image shall I use to illustrate how I feel here?
How will that image change how I feel?
We shall see.
This one. I chose this one at this moment and inserted it here.
That was a surprise. (so now I am surprised)
Was it a surprise for you? Probably not. Continue reading Writing to order.
by EdContexts Facilitators
Our “#f5f” (“Find 5 Friday”) “picks” for September (thought-provoking or inspiring posts we’ve come across during the month that we ‘like’) ended up with a teaching and pedagogy focus - possibly due to the influence of the ‘Connected Courses’ MOOC (#ccourses), which some of us at EdConteXts are participating in.
Apostolos K. (“AK”) @koutropoulos (instructional designer, educator)
‘Critical Pedagogy: Intentions and Realities (Online Edition)’
In his post, AK uses a ‘Hybrid Ped’ article written by EdConteXts facilitator Maha Bali to reflect on his own teaching practices. Mirroring Maha’s article, AK takes the three intentions of critical pedagogy outlined by Maha and writes about how he sees each of them play out in the online class he teaches. The importance of considering context in teaching comes through: in valuing the diversity (in experience, background, age, culture) of all learners in the class, and by adapting standard assignments to provide an outlet for learners to express their culture and experience in the work they submit.
Helen Blunden @ActivateLearn (learning consultant)
‘Part 1 of a social onboarding – a case study…’
Helen Blunden outlines (part 1 of) a comprehensive case demonstrating how an effective learning needs analysis is undertaken in a corporate environment. It requires gaining a thorough understanding of the learner’s context, needs, and learning / work environment; the (business) purpose for the program, engaging the right people – often through sheer resourcefulness and determination, and identifying how to best use existing tools and technologies to achieve learning and business outcomes. In this context, designing an effective learning experience is all about making it directly relevant and bringing as much of it into the learner’s work context as possible. Continue reading F5F for September
By Sherif Osman, Cairo, Egypt
Reflecting on my teaching is a valuable skill I learned and developed during my teacher training, but I often find myself reflecting on my learning as a student and why I behaved in a certain way. I remember the time I was relocating from Kuwait to Egypt during the first Gulf war and moving from a British school to an Egyptian ‘international’ school and some of those early classroom experiences that still live with me ‘til today.
I vividly remember the first day of class. I must have been around 6 years old. The teacher put up a picture and asked if we knew what we saw in the picture. After she paused for all but 4 seconds, she proceeded to inform us that: “This children, is a crocodile, we have them here in the Nile”. I remember my hand shooting upwards in enthusiasm and when given permission to speak I said “No miss! This is an alligator”. The teacher chuckled and said “They are the same thing, however, the alligator is a baby crocodile”. I immediately responded “No Miss, this can’t be. Crocodiles live in sea water but alligators prefer fresh water”.* I can still remember the look on the teacher’s face – a mixture of confusion, shock and anger. Her response to me was to send me to see the principal. Continue reading Alligators and crocodiles
by EdContexts Facilitators
Here are our CLMOOC inspired “#f5f” (“Find 5 Friday”) “picks” for August – thought-provoking posts we’ve come across during the month that have shown sensitivity to context in education. Themes of social justice, edtech, and learning in open spaces are covered in our finds this month.
Cody Charles (educator) _@CodyKeith_
We first noticed Cody Charles’ post “WTF? 10 Counterproductive Behaviors of Social Justice Educators” in late July when it was published on the “Teaching Social Justice” blog, which we featured last time in our #f5f. This is an insightful post that points out 10 habits or behaviours that can be easy for social justice educators to fall into, but which tend to hinder rather than help our cause. Many of us at EdContexts thought it raised such important points that it’s something we’ll likely be posting above our desks as a reference to inform our daily practice. Continue reading EdConteXts finds 5: on social justice, edtech, & open learning
by EdContexts Facilitators
In response to the often grandiose and paradoxical claims made by MOOC providers and professors, educators around the world have brought up critical issues about education across borders. An issue that has become more pronounced in the discourse of cross-border higher education is that MOOCs are making education more “democratic” while in fact they are further re-centralizing it and eschewing collaboration among educators across nations and contexts. Indeed, a lot of the educators who decided to enter cross-border higher education from the fancy door of xMOOCs often show striking lack of knowledge, experience, or even interest about the implications of teaching/learning crossing borders. Many professors, usually in the Western world, show up in the new landscape without having thought about complexities of cross-contextual pedagogy, diversity and cultural difference, and the many vagaries of contexts on a global scale.
However, the discourse about MOOCs and cross-border higher education, including in the mainstream media, we’ve come across a lot of conversations that add nuance to the issue of context in education. Continue reading Education in Context: A Few More Good Picks
By Clarissa Bezerra, Brasília, Brazil
As an educator and as a woman, I have had the privilege of having a very strong woman to look up to – my mother. Today, in my 39th birthday, after having spent most of my day by her side, I decided that it was time I wrote down a story she once told me about her life as a young and inexperienced teacher back in her hometown, a small and impoverished village by a river, called Cajari, in the heart of the state of Maranhão, northeastern region of Brazil. This was back in the early sixties, and my mom had just finished her studies, the then-called ‘Escola Normal’, which no longer exists, to become a teacher. Back then, it was the only choice a woman had to being someone’s wife and bearing children.
My grandmother Raimunda was my grandfather’s, Jerônimo, third wife. My mom was the first-born daughter of three siblings, but they had a whole bunch of other brothers and sisters from my grandpa’s first two unions. Having become an enthusiastic young teacher, my mom greatly contributed to the setting up of one of the first schools in her village, where she taught Portuguese, basic Math, and basic agricultural practices to students who were in their majority either as old as, or older than herself. She remembers the exhilarating feeling of standing in the front of the group in the very simple classroom. That was, she had always known, her true calling. She was a natural-born educator, taking after my grandma Dodoca, whom I will certainly write about in another post. Continue reading An education(al) anecdote from Brazil
By Sushimita Maryam, Bangalore, India
(This article was first published on IndiaAhead.com and is re-published here with their permission and the author’s)
Life is a bag of mixed experiences – some interesting some not so interesting – but all relevant, all impart learning, all best lived in the present. So when a student from one of the groups that I was facilitating an intercultural dialogue with asked me – ‘Sushmita what about you- what has been your great experience?’ as they were all sharing their own, I was taken aback. Not only because I was not expecting to be asked a question (that is a part of my job as the dialogue facilitator) but also because it is really hard to pick just one.
That dilemma though was only for a moment –and it seems I did not have to really think hard.‘Soliya!’ I heard myself say, straight from the heart. It is impossible to not see how incredibly rewarding an experience is when you are right there living it. ‘It is great to be here getting people from different parts of the world to talk to and listen to each other. As much as it is a wonderful learning opportunity for you, it is for me as well. This feeling of high watching you all connect with each other despite of the differences that supposedly divide you is amazing.’ I said to my group that had ten students – 2 Jordanians, 3 Egyptians, 2 Americans, One Italian, One Dutch and One Pakistani.
What is the challenge in ‘talking to each other’ and in ‘listening to each other’ and why is there the need for a facilitator to get people to do that? I would have asked that question had I not been doing the work that I do now as a mediator and as a dialogue facilitator. Continue reading Unprecedented Interconnectedness: opportunity or threat?
By Scott Johnson, Canada
My name is Scott Johnson and up until 6 years ago I worked in the building trades both being an apprentice and then teaching apprentices. My last 5 years of work involved helping build online courses at a small college in North East Alberta, Canada. A year ago the Provincial Government here cut funding to education and my job disappeared. Given that trades education hasn’t changed over the almost 50 years since I began working I’m not sure why I persist…
It was never my intention to become a teacher or be associated with education. My experience with “school” (that’s what I’ll call it) was not good, but what can you do in life without learning some things? School’s all about that, right? Anyway growing up with teachers, professors and all kinds of professional people as neighbors, it seemed natural that school was where I too could learn cool things that made me interesting and capable like them.
Except, school wasn’t about that. It was a closed system of rules and structure invented to present a world that could fit inside a school. It was orderly, lessonized and so important to itself that you could actually fail school and be blamed for being stupid. Lucky for me I had smart parents who taught me how to extract information from the world—what I wanted from school and couldn’t get. Continue reading School wasn’t about that…
Praveen Yadav, Umes Shrestha, and Uttam Gaulee
(facilitators of ELT Choutari, an English Language Teachers’
and bloggers’ network from Nepal)
The world is getting far more connected, but not all connections are the same. Nor do connections automatically achieve the social, professional, and other purposes that the Internet is often credited for by those who have full and unhindered access to it. So, building a professional community, developing resources for it, and engaging its members from the ground up takes a lot of time, courage, and collaboration by one or more members who can stick to it through ups and downs, excitement and frustration.
In this blog post, we’d like to share the story of how we, a group of English language teachers in Nepal gradually built an online professional development community by the name of ELT Choutari. In a sense, this post is a detailed answer to the question that was asked by a colleague who commented on a story that one of us (Praveen) wrote for EdConteXts in June: what do we value as measures of success of/in our network?
ELT Choutari is probably the first English Language Teaching (ELT) blog-zine of its kind in South Asia. It was formed in 2009 by a group of dynamic ELT professionals of Nepal who felt the dire need of scholarly and professional engagement in the virtual world. To involve teachers across the country in professional development through online conversations, the team set up a blog, which was called ‘Nelta Choutari’ until recently. NELTA is the acronym for Nepal English Language Teachers’ Association where members of this informal group belong, and Choutari is a Nepali word meaning the space under/including a tree, the traditional public square where members of the community gather to share ideas and debate issues, tell stories to pass on or generate knowledge, solve problems, and sustain community.We changed the name to ELT Choutari in order to emphasize the group’s independence and informality and to be inclusive of the international scope of our readership—even as we remain grounded in Nepal and continue to share ideas and experiences of teaching/learning in our unique context. Continue reading Building a Community: What We Value
By Maha Bali and Tanya Lau (EdContexts Facilitators)
As facilitators of EdConteXts, we tend to notice when others speak about context in sensitive and thoughtful ways, and we thought we would share some of our “picks” this month for posts we’ve come across on the web that showed sensitivity to context in education. This is like what CLMOOC call “Find 5 Friday” (#f5f) – so here are our five for this month.
Hybrid Pedagogy (open access journal)
We like the journal Hybrid Pedagogy for many reasons, including the fact that they published a couple of articles by two of our facilitators (Shyam and Maha) just before EdConteXts was launched. A recent article we liked on Hybrid Pedagogy by Janine deBaise debunks the myth of “best practice” in education. She poses the problems of using any best practice guidelines universally and regardless of context, without considering individual student needs, abilities and interests, and gives examples from her own teaching.
Continue reading Context Matters – views from around the world
